Ricotta Loaf

January 1, 2015

“This bread is incredibly quick and easy to mix…” This is the opening line in Rose’s intro to the recipe, and this would be true if I had done it right the first time. Everything seemed correct at first blush, but I didn’t pick up on my error until I went into my baking pantry to find the King Arthur Unbleached Flour still on the shelf. Hold on? Shouldn’t the Unbleached flour be in my kitchen? That’s when I realized I used Unbleached Bread Flour instead of the Unbleached AP. Oh no, I thought. It’ll be all wrong. I had enough ricotta left to make a second loaf, so I flipped this seemingly straightforward post into an opportunity to experiment. The question now was: would there be a significant difference between the loaf made with the Unbleached Bread Flour and the Unbleached AP flour. Let’s see how it turned out.

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Ingredients

Volume Grams Ounces

Instructions

(1) 9″ x 5″ loaf pan, a baking stone or steel

The flour, ricotta and soft, soft butter.

The flour just when combined, before it was kneaded for 10 minutes.

The dough after it was kneaded for 10 minutes. The texture has changed enormously.

Look how gorgeously soft the dough is. It felt so beautiful.

Let me just say, at this point the dough made with AP flour was much softer and more tender. It felt silkier to the touch.

This is where the recipe takes a left turn. It took me about 30 minutes to realize my error, so the bread flour had a little more time to rise than the AP.

Starting to fold the dough into a loaf. Notice the bread flour dough on the left has slightly more volume. This could be because it had more time to rise, but it was also heavier and firmer to the touch.

Still there is more volume and weight with the dough made with bread flour.

They are both ready for their second rise. They look relatively the same size at this point.

After the second rise, the dough made with bread flour clearly has more volume.

And you’ll notice the loaf on the left (made with bread flour) has a different surface texture, and larger air bubbles. My guess is it will result in a larger crumb after it’s baked.

After baking the loaf made with bread flour is larger and heavier.

At this point, it’s easy to see which loaf is made with AP flour and which is made with bread flour.

This is the AP loaf cut in slices. Ricotta Loaf, The Finer Cookie.

Conclusion: This bread was very chewy and rich. Did I love it? Not enough to make again. The ricotta and butter seemed to add richness, and maybe some texture, but I didn’t feel over-the-moon about it. I’m happy to have tried it though.
WHAT ARE THE ALPHA BAKERS? : Here’s how it works: once a month, for the next two years, 25 Alpha Bakers commit to baking their way through every recipe of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible. Each month we post our experiences on our blog sites: our successes, our failures, our like and dislikes . The recipes are scheduled in advance so that everyone is baking the same recipe at the same time. No recipes can be shared in my Alpha Bakers Bread Bible posts due to publishing restrictions enforced by the publisher, but if you love to bake bread, this is a must-have book. You can see other tutorials for the same recipe at the following link The Bread Bible Alpha Bakers at http://breadbiblealphabakers.blogspot.ca/